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225 1. Awakening 1. It is now postulated that the apse may actually have been the site of a second entrance to the cave rather than one of its more remote recesses. Because of differences in its style of composition and in the pigments used, the adjacent figure of the rhinoceros is thought to be unrelated to the other elements of the painting (Anjoulet 2005). 2. This shamanic interpretation has considerable support, as exemplified in David Lewis-Williams’s (2002, 264–66) discussion in The Mind in the Cave. Lewis-Williams, though, appears unaware of Bataille’s much earlier writings on Lascaux. If the figure does represent a person in shamanic trance (which the erect phallus might also support), it complicates but still supports Bataille’s interpretation . In any event, the relationship depicted should not be understood simplistically as the quid pro quo of a human death (actual or ritual) for an animal death; it is not a trade but, in Bataille’s sense, a “religious” and hence mysterious, metonymic affinity, an equivalence in the face of death. 3. “Animals wait for nothing, and death does not surprise them; death in some way eludes the animal . . . man’s intellectual activity put him in the presence of death, in the radical terrifying negation of what he essentially is” (Bataille 2005, 152). “The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself or behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself” (Heidegger 2001, 176). 4. Gianni Vattimo (2004, 27–28) suggests that Heidegger’s term Verwindung indicates the possibility of weakening the hold of metaphysical absolutes (such as a concept of human nature) over our thinking, an approach he refers to as “weak thought”—Il pensiero debole. This “twisting” is necessary precisely because we cannot entirely overcome the legacy of metaphysics, since its effective historical presence haunts every mode of Western thought and never more so than today. NOTES 226 notes to chapter 1 5. For Benjamin, historicism naturalizes the past as universal history, an inevitable and intractable process of progress or decline, leading up to and beyond the present moment, rather than as the constantly reworked and remembered material of human actions. For historicism, the paintings of Lascaux would stand as an “‘eternal’ image of the past” rather than as offering the possibility of “a unique experience with the past” (Benjamin 1973, 254). As Kendall (2005, 14) remarks, Bataille claims, albeit in a slightly different sense, that “prehistory is universal history par excellence.” 6. Bataille studied under Alexandre Kojéve, the foremost interpreter of Hegel’s philosophy and, as Derrida (1995a) shows, Hegel’s influence on Bataille is pervasive. 7. Bataille (2005, 54) frequently suggests that for “men of primitive times, as for men of the modern day who we rightly or wrongly call primitives,” there are shared patterns of belief that separate “them” from “us”—assuming a complicity between author and reader. Yet he also claims that “modern primitives,” unlike “real primitives,” lack “the upsurge of creative awakening that makes Lascaux man our counterpart and not that of the aborigine” (159, my emphasis). Either way, Bataille relegates contemporary aboriginal peoples to an indeterminate status in a way that perfectly illustrates what Agamben regards as the political dangers of the ways in which the anthropological machine produces zones of indeterminacy where certain populations are treated as less than fully human. 8. Agamben (2004, 34) makes this same point in his discussion of Haeckel’s positing a missing link between animal and human, which he called the ape-man (Affenmensch). 9. “Where Hegel relayed the history of consciousness, Bataille reveled in all that consciousness cannot capture, that words cannot describe.” (Kendall 2007, 208). If, for Hegel, “the wounds inflicted by history invariably heal without leaving scars” (Gourevitch 1988, ix), then Bataille frequently described his own life as an open wound. 10. It might also suggest that recent debates concerning posthumanism and hybridity stemming largely from Donna Haraway’s (1991) work recapitulate aspects of Bataille’s speculations about the condition of humanity at the end of history, in particular his invocation of the image of the headless, acephalic man (see later in this chapter). Of course, many of...